Piranha Firing Point

by Michael Dimercurio

  “Sir, passing course one zero zero, ten degrees from ordered course,” the helmsman barked.

  “Very well.”

  The battle-stations crew flooded into the room’s forward door, taking over from the afternoon watch crew.

  Forward, to the left of the entrance door, was the ship-control station, a sort of airplane cockpit arrangement.

  Two pilot seats flanked a console and a vertical instrument panel was stuffed with computer-driven displays.

  The panel extended into the overhead and slanted back over the two pilots’ heads to a seat aft of the center console. To the left of the arrangement an L-shaped wraparound panel surrounded a swivel seat. The four men of the ship-control team were the helmsman in the right pilot seat, who held the airplane-style yoke that controlled the rudder and the bow planes. The planes man in the left seat had control of the stern planes and the ship’s angle. The chief of the watch sat at the left L-shaped ballast-control panel, which controlled the ship’s physical trim and dive systems, the tanks and pumps and hydraulics, and the masts of the sail high above them.

  Finally, the diving officer, behind the two pilot seats, supervised the other three.

  Aft of the ship-control station was the rectangular periscope stand, the “conn,” where the captain and officer of the deck stood their watches, although they were free to roam the room. The conn was surrounded by gleaming handrails and was packed with equipment in the overheads—sonar repeater displays, television monitors, microphones on coiled cords for various battle-announcing circuits, several phones, a folding command seat, and two stowed type-21 periscopes mounted side by side on stainless steel poles extending into the overhead.

  On the port side of the conn aft of the ballast-control panel was a tightly packed row of navigation consoles, where the satellite receivers and inertial nav equipment were set up. On the starboard side of the room was the attack center, a row of BSY-4 battlecontrol consoles set up to allow tracking of multiple targets. Four officers manned these computer screens. The aft station of the attack center was the weapon-control console, set up to program the torpedoes in the torpedo room one deck below.

  Aft of the periscope stand were two navigation-plotting tables, one devoted to the navigation electronic chart, the second to tracking the main enemy contact.

  The entire room would easily fit into most family rooms with room to spare. Not one cubic centimeter of volume was unused, every reachable space from the deck to the overhead packed with equipment, panels, consoles, displays, intercoms, phones, cables, valves, piping, alarm boxes, seats, or plotting tables. At battle stations, when twenty men would stand watch in the room, the chief of the watch was required to quadruple the air conditioning to the space, not so much for the people as the electronic equipment.

  Lieutenant Horburg was relieved at the conn by the battle-stations OOD, a slightly older lieutenant named Dietz. Pattern’s executive officer arrived as well, his face marked by the lines of his bedspread. Commander Henry Vale was taller than Pattern, with light skin and dark eyes and hair, his body slight, wearing wire-rimmed glasses that gave him an academic’s look.

  Patton pulled on his headset. Horburg took his battle station at the second battlecontrol console of the BSY4, position two, the master target-solving station. Four other officers manned positions one, three, and four, the weapons officer taking a station at the aft panel, the weapons console. The navigator manned the aft plot table with a ring of men around him, plotting the manual solution to the master target. Meanwhile the ship-control team was replaced by the battle-stations crew, and several phonetalkers stationed themselves around key watchstanders.

  Patton blew into his boom mike, testing it, then called to Vale, who at battle stations would be the fire-control coordinator, in charge of the men finding the solution to the master target.

  “Coordinator, Captain, test”

  “Cap’n, Coordinator, aye,” Vale replied.

  “Sonar, Captain, test.”

  “Conn, Sonar, aye,” came the reply. It wasn’t De-Meers but his first-class petty officer, O’Connor. Patton raised a finger to Vale, telling him to hold down the fort.

  Patton left the room through the forward starboard door leading to sonar.

  “How’s the hearing?” Patton asked Demeers, who had been joined by four sonarmen sitting in the consoles.

  The senior chief was standing behind them, looking over their shoulders.

  Demeers shook his head, pointing at his ears.

  “Dammit,” Patton said. “O’Connor, you got the bubble?” “Yessir,” the sonarman said. “Senior’s backing me up, Cap’n.”

  “What’s going on out there?”

  “Blueout across the eastern bearings. One loud explosion after another. The convoy is taking hits, sir. And I’m worried.” O’Connor turned to look up at Patton.

  “I’m not sure we’ll hear the bad guy. Or bad guys. This is damned loud. Captain. It’s deafened the senior chief, and we’re getting up to 140 decibels from out here, peak, from detonations, and we’re over twenty miles away.

  God knows how loud it’ll be when we get in close. Plus, I don’t know what I’m looking for. The search plan has us all over the frequency map.” “What are you saying, O’Connor?” Patton asked harshly.

  “I’m saying I’m not sure I can hear an attacking submarine over all this, and even if the sea was quiet, I might not see him first I need to know what I’m up against—diesel boat. Destiny II, Rising Sun, older

  688.

  I can’t search for all of them at once, it would take a week! So if we go in, we go in half deaf.” O’Connor pointed at Demeers.

  Patton looked at the senior chief, making his next question loud and lip-readable, “You agree. Senior?”

  “Yessir.” Demeers’ voice was still distorted, a deaf man. “We’re putting our head into a lion’s mouth.”

  Patton glared at them, feeling bile flood his stomach.

  He jammed his hands in his pockets—after all, he hardly needed the crew to think he was frightened, although he certainly was, O’Connor was dead right.

  Heading into an op area with no confirmed search plan was worse than looking for a needle in a haystack.

  What frequency tonal? How loud? Did low frequencies show up first? Where should the processors be set? Wide bands or narrow? The sonarmen knew they were putting their necks on a chopping block and so did Patton, but he had to show them confidence, because that was all they had at this point—just the captain’s instincts and his guts.

  “Listen, goddammit,” Patton finally said, his nostrils flared, his black eyes flashing. “I’m going in and I’m going in shooting. You guys find me a fucking target, I don’t care how hard it is. You got that?”

  O’Conner nodded, looking as if he’d just been asked to drive a car at one hundred mph at midnight with no headlights.

  As Patton returned to the control room he wondered how he was going to explain all this to fleet command.

  He’d missed the intruder submarines, he wouldn’t hear them when he returned to attack them, and his sonarmen wanted to just go home. When this mission was over, he would probably lose his ship, his command pin, his shoulder boards, and probably his dolphins, because losing a convoy he was charged with protecting was not the way to promotion. Of course, that assumed he walked away from this operation instead of becoming fish food at the bottom of the East China Sea.

  Vale was staring at him. “What?” Patton said, irritated.

  “What’s going on. Captain?” “I’ll tell the men,” Patton said. “Attention in the fire-control team.” A dozen whispered conversations—all of them business—halted. “Starting a few minutes ago, we heard multiple explosions from the bearings of the convoy. We’ve turned around and are heading back to the convoy’s position at flank speed. Meanwhile sonar reports a blueout across all eastern bearings, with explosions continuing. The convoy is probably under attack.

  What we don’t know is whether the attack is
coming from an intruder submarine or submarines or whether it was an air attack. My intention is to make maximum speed toward the convoy, and when we’re closer, slow down, rig for ultraquiet, and commence a slow-speed sonar search for any possible submarines.

  Carry on.”

  “Conn, Sonar, aye,” came through Patton’s headset.

  So now, here I am, Patton thought, flanking it into a war zone like a fool, with no idea who the enemy is or what he sounds like. I might as well just wear a sign that says, “Shoot me.”

  pacific ocean altitude: 51,000 feet There was a big difference between sleeping on an airplane and trying to sleep on an airplane.

  Pacino was alternately too hot and too cold, trying to get comfortable in a seat that reclined all the way back.

  At the moment he was sweating, his head throbbing, sleep eluding him despite the bone-tired ache in his limbs and back. He tried to force himself down deeper, to let go of the world. Still half awake, he saw a stream of lucid visions, one of them the SSNX painted red, the hull being lowered into a sea of blood.

  A sound came to him from a long way away. He could hear snatches of a voice, a television, tuned to SNN, Paully having forgotten to turn it off. “In other financial news today, the European Union stock market lost over twenty points on fears that the renewed hostilities in White China— We interrupt the World Financial Report for breaking news from the East China Sea-Operation Sealift has apparently met with disaster. Reporting from the Pentagon is our war correspondent—”

  Pacino sat up abruptly, reaching for Paully White’s shoulder.

  “Paully, wake up, quick.”

  Both men watched, eyes wide with incredulity. The report was only half done when the pilot called back on the intercom: “Admiral, we’re getting a secure voice radio call from Air Force One. The president wants to talk to you.”

  SS-403 arctic storm Admiral Chu Hua-Feng had reclined the command-console seat. His headset had grown uncomfortable, so he had pulled it off. His eyes shut, he was breathing deeply, listening to the electronic hum of the computer and display systems. A high-pitched, distant whine sounded from the inertial-navigation rotating element, a small titanium sphere that spun at over 10,000 rpm. Below the whine purred the deep bass of cool air blowing in through the control-room ducts.

  The seat of the console was relaxing to the extreme, and Chu was beginning to believe he would be able to spend days in this seat if he had to. In a pocket below the cushion was an endurance package, with several candy bars, two bottles of water, and a waste bag. On discovering, it, the navigator had been jubilant, talking about stocking his bag with tea, magazines, cookies. His assistant, the operations officer, had joked that if he had one of those decadent Western blow-up dolls, he could stay in the seat for months. Chu had glared at his officers and told them to knock off the joking, but privately he had chuckled over it.

  He was lying there, reclined far back, nearly flat, when he thought he heard a buzz in the earpiece hanging around his neck.

  “Admiral, new contact, we have a seven-bladed screw.”

  Xhiu Liu, the navigator at the sensor console, had snagged something. Chu sat the seat up and pulled on the headset simultaneously.

  “Designate contact ST-3,” Xhiu said, his voice back in focus as Chu strapped on his earpiece. “Submerged warship, American 688-class improved, bearing two six four. Contact is extremely distant but is making way rapidly.

  Admiral, we have a broadband trace on him from his equipment, maybe some kind of pump. In addition, we’ve got an intermittent rattle.” “Very good. Next tube, Chen?” Chu asked Chen Zhu, the operations officer, standing at the weapons-control console.

  “Number eight, sir.”

  “Warm up weapons eight and nine. Rood both tubes.

  Wait on the bowcap doors; let’s keep them shut for now.

  Program eight as the ultraquiet unit and nine as the impulse unit.” The weapon in tube eight would be set up to swim out quietly at slow speed, while tube nine would be reserved for trouble. In that case a solid rocket motor would blow the weapon out into the sea, the torpedo preset for a highspeed transit.

  Chen acknowledged, but Chu was already on his next stream of nearly instinctive orders. “Ship Control, right five effective degrees rudder, throttle up to thirty clicks, steady course north.”

  “Five degrees, thirty clicks north, aye, Admiral.”

  “Navigator, set up to get a leg on target ST-3. Three minutes north, then three minutes south. Something tells me he’s way out there.”

  “Sir.”

  Chu waited, watching data as valuable as gold roll onto the displays. He was feeling fully alert, the way an athlete feels at the start of the second half of a game.

  The ship’s pulse was there in front of him, and after the first thirty torpedoes had been fired, he was getting used to the rhythm of the ship. He was almost comfortable with the odd blind-console stupid-Second Captain Japanese design. It was working out so well that he could believe that this was how he would design a submarine.

  And yet, had the system really had its shakedown cruise? Certainly they had taken the ship through combat.

  He had fired thirty torpedoes and made thirty confirmed hits, and twenty-seven ships with tens of thousands of men had gone to the bottom or vaporized in plasma explosions from his targeting and tactical skill, but then, that was the nature of a submarine—an assassin that was invisible, its stealth its main weapon. But how would it perform against another submarine?

  Hadn’t the Japanese scheduled the Rising Sun sea trials as a submarine-versus-submarine exercise? Was there some weakness in the vessels that would make them do poorly against another sub, even ones as unsophisticated as a 688-class? The only answer to that question would come with the first undersea challenge, and by all appearances that was happening right now.

  “Leg complete, sir. Recommend maneuver to the south, Lo Sun said from Chu’s right shoulder at the auxiliary command panel.

  “Nav, any change in turn count or speed of ST3?”

  “No, Admiral. Still inbound.”

  “No sign of change in his heading? Does he hear us?”

  “Doubt it, sir. He’s as loud as a train wreck.” Xhiu’s face was amazingly calm, his voice steady and deep.

  Could it be that his fidgety navigator was getting some confidence?

  “Very well, Nav,” he said, giving the next orders to turn the ship to the south to get a parallax distance to the incoming American.

  USS Annapolis, SSN-760

  “Sonar, Captain, you have any detect of the Santa Fe?”

  “Captain, Sonar, no.” The reply left Patton profoundly dissatisfied. Chris Carnage and Santa Fe were out there somewhere, and if he came on a submerged target, it would be nice to know it was a genuine enemy.

  And the worst of it was that there was no contingency plan for this. The more normal ASW sweep plans were bristling with contingencies—what to do if the other sub is attacked, what to do if both the companion sub and the convoy are attacked, but nowhere was there a contingency for the convoy being completely wiped out while the sweeping subs were tens of miles out. He was risking the ship, perhaps foolishly, by going into a hot zone, unsanitized and unsafe, with no idea of what he was looking for.

  He had thought of one idea. He could lay a field of passively circling Mark 52 torpedoes in the area where the convoy used to be. If they detected anything they’d run for the sound, perhaps get a target. Yet that would expend his whole torpedo load for perhaps one hit, and if he did it properly, he’d run the risk one of his own torpedoes turning back around to come and get him. In the end, the idea was a loser.

  He looked down at the chart table from the conn. It was time.

  “Helm, all stop!” he barked, the helmsman answering up. “OOD, rig for ultraquiet with the port side of the engine room shut down.”

  The ship would coast down from forty-one to five knots, and Patton was rigging the ship for quiet the old-fashioned way. Shutting do
wn half the plant was potentially a suicidal move. The sonar girls loved it, but the officers hated it, because valuable minutes were needed to be able to return to power in the event they needed to turn tail and run.

  At five knots though, he would be able to hear all the way to Tokyo. And if he was fifteen miles from where the convoy had gone down—and they had been targeted from over the horizon—he could be overrunning the attackers even now.

  “Sonar, Captain, slowing.”

  “Captain, Sonar, aye.” “Supervisor to control,” Patton said, waiting. De-Meers and O’Connor soon came out, both frowning.

  “Well, gentlemen, here’s where you earn your medals,” Patton said.

  “I’d rather earn my way home,” Demeers said, his voice only slightly distorted.

  “Good, you can hear me,” Patton said. “So get in there and find the bad guys. Go on, shoo.” He waved them away.

  “Sir, ship’s speed is four knots,” Lieutenant Dietz said from the other side of the conn.

  “Helm, all ahead one-third,” Patton called. “Sonar, Captain, report all contacts.”

  “Captain, Sonar, aye, no contacts.” “Heads up,” Patton said, his tone confident, his jaw set. He had to act as if he were entering a battle he could win, despite feeling he couldn’t.

  “Admiral O’Shaughnessy is here with me.”

  President Jaisal Warner’s voice was projecting from a speaker phone. On Pacino’s end, he had an old-fashioned UHF radio handset, taken from the flight deck.

  He was sitting on the cramped jumpseat behind the copilot, and he could see the stars shining above the Pacific through the wind screen.

  He clicked the button on the phone to speak. “Hello, sir. I heard the news.”

  “What do you recommend?” Warner asked without preamble.

  It was just like her to do that, he thought in frustration.

  She had all the facts, and all he had was a news broadcast.

  “Depends, ma’am,” Pacino said firmly. “We lost the whole RDF. Is there anything else we can throw at the Reds?”

  O’Shaughnessy’s voice came on, his tone so neutral it could have come from a computer. “Patch, we’ve embarked the backup rapid deployment force out of Pearl Harbor. If the RDF was big, the BU-RDF is gigantic.